UK workers would take 10% pay cut for ‘above average’ happiness, study finds

theguardian.com:

What price happiness? The answer might be £3,360 a year.

The average UK worker would take a 10.5% pay cut to work for an employer where staff enjoy “above average” levels of happiness, a study has shown.

The research, which examined 23 million jobseekers across the UK, US and Canada, comes amid a growing push for companies and governments to quantify the costs and benefits of wellbeing alongside cash measures of economic output.

George Ward, an academic at the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, observed how jobseekers on the Indeed recruitment website screened out “unhappy firms” from their job search. He concluded that companies should “invest in organisational and management practices that are conducive to worker happiness”.

He presented the results at a conference on wellbeing at Oxford University on Thursday.

Ward used data from Indeed, who asked millions of employees if they “feel happy at work most of the time”, to generate a “work happiness score”. It was displayed on job adverts from those firms for 10 months.

In the US, the probability of a jobseeker applying for a post went up 14% if a firm had an average rather than low happiness score. On average, younger people showed greater taste for happier workplaces while richer respondents were willing to take larger pay cuts to work at happier firms.

In the UK, jobseekers surveyed by Ward said they were willing to trade a 10.5% pay cut to work for a company with an above average happiness score of 75 out of 100, rather than 65 which was average. For a worker on an average UK income of £32,000, that is equivalent to a £3,360 cut.

“Executives say happiness is hugely important but when you ask them if they do anything, it is only about 25% that are doing